James Russell Lowell Quotes

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky; and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

It's the boredom that kills you. You read until you're tired of that. You do crossword puzzles until you're tired of that. This is torture. This is mental torture.

I'd probably sit around the house and get lonesome if I didn't have something to do.

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.

I have been back in Paris for two weeks. Nothing new. Life is still bitter.

My escape is to just get in a boat and disappear on the water.

Gee, its lonesome in the outfield. It's hard to keep awake with nothing to do.

When you grow up by the sea, you spend a good deal of time looking at the horizon. You wonder what on Earth the waves might bring - and where the sea might deposit you - until one day you know you have lived between two places, the scene of arrival and the point of departure.

I live a very dull life here... indeed I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else.

… the same dreary barrenness day after day. The same naked waste. I have never seen anything which impressed so strongly on my mind a feeling of desolation.

Everybody seems to wonder what it's like down here. I gotta get away from this day-to-day running around. Everybody knows this is nowhere.

I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.

I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

All the fear in the world, and the violence that comes from the fear, and the hatred that comes from the violence, and the lonliness that comes from the hatred. All the unhappiness, all the cruelty, it gathers like clouds in the air, and grows dark and cold and heavy, and falls like grey snow in thick layers over the land. Then the world is muffled and numb, and no one can hear each other or feel each other. Think how sad and lonely that must be.

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space.

I'd like to be in a tiny indie where I'm lost at sea.

Alone, Alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never saint took pity on My soul in agony

There's no grand excellence to it. In my experience it was just almost the gulaggy boringness of it that'll kill you. You're just in this murk. And you're with other humans, but you lose all your human skills and it's just like you're in this plastic bag and you can't quite connect with people. You lose your ability to transmit electricity or something, and to receive it.

Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

Satan has his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested.

The neighborhood children, of course, were forbidden by their parents to play with my little boy, Garth, so I finally got him a little kitten to play with. A couple of weeks later we found it on the porch with its neck wrung.

No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.

I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.